Steffens RV-7 building site!

Today I arranged all the rivets from the wing hardware and the leftover rivets from the empenage into a storage cabinet I bought. This will be much easier to manage, compared to having a big pile af small plastic- and paperbags! 😉

After that I began working a bit on the main spars. The inboard leading edges of the wings are fueltanks. These get attached to the main spars by several flathead screws. So, a lot of platenuts has to be installed in the spars.
First I drilled, then countersunk the holes for the rivets that holds the nutplates.

Then I riveted on the nutplates. The pneumatic squeezer was great for this!

Finally both main spars are done. That’s a lot of platenuts!!

Next thing is to countersink the screw holes to fit the dimples in the fuel tank skin. There is a lot of disgussion about this amongst RV-builders, some believe its better to countersink these holes before installing the platenuts, using a guide tool for the cutter. Vans tell you to install the platenuts and use these as guide, and as far as I can tell from builders who have tried both, there is not much difference. So, I desided to go the easy way, Vans way. I tried to countersink a few holes before calling it quits, it worked great. By the way, I have a special pneumatic drill for this, running 500 rpm.